This space takes a break from its long hiatus to bring you the news that the Federal Jazz Commission is ending its more than 25 year run at Colonel Brooks' Tavern tonight. A couple of the guys are moving away and it seems that the band, which years ago survived many personnel changes, is ready to give up the game.

 

It's not a complete loss -- Henning Hoehne, the most interesting musician in the group, will be taking up the gig. The clarinet and sax player is arguably the most inventive and beautiful improviser on the local scene. But still, the end of the FJC era is an occasion worth marking.

 

I've been planning to go tonight, but I have to admit that since the Post published a prominent story about the group today, I imagine the old bar will be pretty crowded. Part of me says, so what? (Notice that the paper spells my friend Jeremy's name wrong.)

 

There aren't a lot of places in DC where you can count on hearing quality jazz on regularly scheduled occasions, let alone the old-timey jazz that the FJC played. Their material -- the 1920s and 30s music of the likes of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller -- is not exactly my meat, but they played with such quality, assurance and fun that even people far more skeptical than me have been able to take great pleasure in listening to them.

 

This music is pretty fun, after all, by jazz standards. Part of what makes it great is that it's a form of collective improvisation -- not just serial solos by the horn players, but two or three of them playing together, in harmony or friendly competition and building off of each other's energy. This is a six-piece band whose members have played with each other for years, but who are all such students of the music that they are constantly looking for new ideas to bring to bear.

 

Colonel Brooks on Tuesday nights has been, for me, best as an unusual gathering place. There are quite a number of old people who come week after week, year after year, sitting in the same spots. The guy with the gray pony tail who sat close enough to the trombonist Steve Welch to take hold of the mute following Welch's solos. The couple who always came out and danced a couple of numbers and managed to convey that they were enjoying themselves even though their facial expressions never changed for a moment.

 

This part of the crowd would grow animated during particularly fast and hot numbers, waving their brown napkins in the air, New Orleans-style. One time, I was dancing and asked a woman at a nearby table if I could grab her napkin to swing about. I guess she didn't hear me ask because she stood up and slugged me hard in the shoulder, grabbing the napkin back.

 

Along with the old people there were the young. Colonel Brooks is the bar closest to Catholic University. Admittedly, many of the kids who showed up were more interested in a game on TV or in heading upstairs where, until recently, they could smoke. But some of them, you could tell, dug the music in spite of themselves.

 

There was a time, six or eight years ago, when I went quite regularly, about every six weeks. It was a place for Tuesday birthday parties and an unfailingly cheering place to bring out-of-town guests, or women I was trying to date. (Oh, how the gals dug that old-timey stuff...)

 

It was the first place we took our son to hear live music, when he was about two months old. The waiter thought we'd want to take him upstairs to the no smoking area -- where he couldn't even have heard the music!

 

The place made for such wonderfully odd groupings of people -- my parents with my racetrack ruffian friend, my friend's young girlfriend who got grossed out when a visiting doctor was trying to impress her with his talk of working with monkey brains in the lab.

 

Jeremy always seemed to bring several people, from his work or people he'd just met or people he'd known in earlier days in other states. Jeremy has always been loyal to the music, though, standing at the edge of the bar area and yelling approving "yeahs!" to the FJC's finest work. His attention to the music left his friends wide open and I met "doctors and lawyers and men of all degree," as an obscure old song put it.

 

At the end of the night, the Federal Jazz Commission would play "Just a Little While to Stay Here," with the cornetist and leader Marty Frankel giving the same, wry introductions to each of the band members ("that multi-fingered plucker, Tom Gray"). Jeremy would explicate the lyrics, saying that it was a carpe diem theme, seize the day.

 

I'm glad Jeremy and the band's other fans did seize the day, for so many Tuesdays, while the music lasted.